Activists blast Home Depot despite move to go green

Home Depot officials announced Tuesday that the store will begin selling wood products from sustainably managed forests

March 15, 1999
Web posted at: 6:04 p.m. EST (2304 GMT)

Officials at Home Depot, the world's largest home improvement retailer, announced Tuesday that they have endorsed independent, third-party forest certification and wood from certified forests. Despite this move to appease the environmental community and give consumers the choice to purchase green-certified wood products, the activist group Rainforest Action Network said it will hold protests outside the company's stores across North America on St. Patrick's Day because the company continues to sell wood products from the world's remaining old-growth forests.

"Home Depot still plans to sell products made from the planet's last remaining old growth forests, and that's simply barbaric when a scant 20 percent of these ancient forests still survive," said Michael Brune, Rainforest Action Network old growth campaign director.

Annette Verschuren, Home Depot Canada president, announced that the company had joined the Certified Forests Products Council, a non-profit organization that promotes responsible forest product buying practices and the sale of wood from Certified Well-Managed Forests, at a meeting of forest industry executives in British Columbia.

"Certification will help ensure a bright future for the entire forest products industry -- for producers, manufacturers and retailers alike," said Verschuren. "Most importantly, consumers will have additional environmental choices."

Nevertheless, Rainforest Action Network, which has repeatedly staged protests outside of Home Depot stores during the past few years, says it finds this gesture empty so long as the store continues to sell old-growth wood products.

"Unless Home Depot stops selling old growth wood this gesture will be meaningless," said Brune. "We don't intend to let Home Depot score a public relations victory with this
half-measure."

At the protests scheduled for Wednesday, the activist group will ask the Home Depot to "go green" in honor of St. Patrick's Day.

Home Depot is already billing itself as a green company. In her speech, Verschuren pointed out initiatives to expand the company's current recycling program to include shrink wrap, metal, wood and wooden pallets and upcoming opportunities in energy conservation and green building practices for the 850 stores it plans to build over the next four years.

"We are greatly concerned about responsibility for the environment of future generations," she said.

The company currently sells old growth cedar and Douglas fir from the temperate rain forests of British Columbia, old growth lauan and ramin from Southeast Asia and mahogany from the Amazon.